This intricate piece of work was performed with great energy, discipline and slickness.
The dancers, all great athletes with poise and fantastic focus, worked together very much as a team with the precision and timing of a sophisticated machine. Movements, formalised and sometimes jerky, were often mesmerising.
A cylindrical frame was used as both a dancing aid and as a piece of manoeuvrable sculpture. The soundtrack had an eerie, sometimes nightmarish, quality.
David Green, East Anglian Daily Times, June 2010
Distortion. Bleakness. Urgency. Dam Van Huynh’s unique use of the body is striking and alarming. Van Huynh controls the dancers, yelling occasional instructions, there is a frenetic and alarming energy. The repetition of a frantic gestural motif, involving the dancers moving their hands in specific patterns on the floor gives the impression of urgent problem solving.
There is a sense of bleakness in Van Huynh Company’s Sudden Change of Event. With no deliberate audio accompaniment the breath becomes very important, increasing a sense of urgent desperation. The way that Van Huynh plays with the human form is fascinating, moving beyond the frequently used hyper-extension and distorted limbs his dancers embody a palpable internal discomfort that manifests itself in strange angles, disrupted movements and desperate energy. It is great to see work that challenges the human form, creating a fresh style and displaying expressive virtuosity.
Hetty Blades, December 2009
The night wrapped up with Dam Van Huynh's Sudden Change of Event, a highly professional, multi-layered performance involving live vocals, live electronic sounds and keyboard, as well as interactive use of set elements. This company is tight and sizzling with potential; and the slender praying mantis-like men provide an interesting juxtaposition to the shorter, dynamic female performers. Dam Van Huynh's distinctive and engaging choreography is always intriguing, ranging from bursts of electric energy to slow whimsical movements that trail off without a definitive end.
Emma Stevenson, Ballet.co Magazine, July 2009
Complexity at its most enthralling. In Sudden Change of Event, Dam Van Huynh has created a piece so intricate that the audience can do nothing but be riveted. Opening with a Brechtian style, the dancers construct their very own set, laying tape down to create their performance space. The jump to the stylised use of dance immediately intensifies the dancers’ talent. The whole piece is reactionary, creating a dance conversation as each dancer responds to and engages with another. The audience remain absorbed, in silence, as they attempt and fail to predict the direction the piece takes. Each movement, each moment, gives birth to the next whether the sequence be contained to one dancer, one body part even, or shared between the company. A large rectangular frame is also innovatively manipulated; once angled dangerously on the verge of toppling over but controlled by the foot of one performer.
Catherine Hooper, Critical Dance Magazine.com, July 2009
Set to experimental vocals from E. Laine and Leon Michener’s accompanying keyboard, choreographer Van Huynh seems to accomplish what the work’s title suggests. Five dancers expressing their individual languages and characteristics interact with and relate to each other. At a given moment a particular choice is decided and what appears to be a harmonious, deliberate partnership is realised. The next instant a new choice is made and the happening ends as suddenly as it began, the performers pressed to adapt to a new situation or alternatively leave the space. Events also repeat themselves, often altering in their repetition. This occurs during the opening section, where several dancers use various methods to mark out the performance space by laying gaffer tape upon the stage. A metal-framed tank-like structure also sits in the space, inviting the protagonists to alter its inner space by placing a hand or a limb inside, until a female dancer resolves to occupy it fully and begin a lithe and curious solo.
Van Huynh’s treatment of the dance vocabulary (which engages with gestures, sequentially shifts through joints and explores the extremities and possibilities of the torso) makes for a detailed, fluid and distinct movement language. Sensual yet almost animalistic, his style is as fascinating to watch as the occurring theme of the dance. Again, the choreography is achieved by a company of technically gifted and adept dancers who connect, influence, manipulate and manoeuvre each other with sensitivity, finesse and assurance.
Michelle Harris, Critical Dance Magazine.com, July 2009
Aesthetically the piece worked well; the frame served as an interesting element, providing us with a sense of dimension and proximity that bounced off the movement content rather strikingly. I found my concept of time completely disappeared and even now I have no idea of how long the piece was, a demonstration perhaps of the fact that Van Huynh is in his own very stylised world, and has perfected the art of drawing an audience into it.
Anna Crofts, Critical Dance Magazine.com, July 2009
It is an absorbing take on chance and possibilities in choreography, as its randomness never looks chaotic. Disruption, changes of direction - it is a world that leaves one uneasy, all the while unfolding seamlessly.
Laura Cappelle, December 2009
Dressed all in grey five dancers (three male and two female) including Van Huynh himself, walk onto the stage at Jacksons Lane and begin to set the stage for their performance; the final performance of the evening. This is the only piece of the evening to indulge in a full stage set and Yann Seabra’s minimalist design is a delight. A steel box/cage without walls is brought forward and placed at the edge of the stage, four grey steel panels cover the back wall, there is a computer and keyboard in one corner and a microphone in another. In turn each dancer puts an outreached hand into the empty air within the steel cage while the rest of the dancers take it in turns to demarcate the dance space with grey electric tape.
After the space has been marked a female dancer steps inside the open box and begins to dance. The dancer performs slow movements on bent knees twisting her torso, contracting the rib cage and reaching her arms in the air. Accompanying her movements come the startling sounds of the amplified brittle staccatos of gasps, spits, chokes and sighs all coming from the mouth of a woman standing behind a microphone at the corner of the stage. As the female dancer in the cage moves and the lady singer gasps and moans the cage is rotated slowly around her and they all move slowly backwards. This initial image is striking. Bathed in light the young blonde dancer looks like a beautiful statue and the adoring men that rotate the box might just as well be rotating the plinth on which she is mounted.
With concentrated reverence the cage, which dominates the stage, is slowly moved around from one side to the other throughout the piece. Virtuoso piano scales and synthesized music accompany the female singer’s isolated sounds, which are almost like a deconstructed version of ‘scatting’, but neither can take away from the prominence of this human voice which in such a guise sounds so far from human.
The dancers often grip their stomachs and their movements are birdlike at points while the female dancer who begins the piece inside the cage repeatedly snakes across the stage in jagged lines on her back using her elbows and lifting her upper back to drag her body along the ground. At one point a male dancer touches a female dancer yet this moment of tactile connection instead seems as though he is unscrewing or re-bolting her shoulder. As the piece nears its climax, lights swell behind the four grey panels lining the back of the stage. The dancers dance with a frenzy convulsed sympathy together and in unison as the lights gradually lower and finally the tape which dictated the limits of their performance space is ripped off the floor.
Van Huynh, who is a very good dancer himself, and his dancers rarely touch one another and it is clear that this is a limbo world where connections between people are mediated and disrupted by either the structure of the cage, the boundary lines traced on the floor or by the jolting movements of their own bodies and the fracturing sounds in the air. Everything is brittle in this world.
Sudden Change of Event is, according to Van Huynh’s programme notes, an exploration of ‘the fragility of momentary events’, and his attempt to capture the way that individuals constantly have to respond to stimuli and the activity in the environment around them is very effectively realised by his combination of angular and jarring movements with the discomfort produced by the dissonance of the human voice choking and spitting into the microphone.
Erin Whitcroft, July 2009
